


The Cure and the Disease

by Diomedes



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Bruce Banner Has Issues, Dark, Everyone captured, Gen, Horror, Hurt No Comfort, Natasha POV, Natasha Romanov Has Issues, Natasha Romanov Is a Good Bro, Team whump, Temporary Character Death, Tony Stark Has Issues, Whump
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-11
Updated: 2017-11-11
Packaged: 2019-01-31 06:12:54
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,996
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12676008
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Diomedes/pseuds/Diomedes
Summary: They break Stark first. One by one the rest of them follow.





	The Cure and the Disease

**Author's Note:**

> BEFORE YOU READ: ‘Dark’ is not a joke tag. If you would prefer a list of content warnings and/or spoilers please skip to the endnote before reading. This constitutes your warning.

They break Stark first. It’s the smart move, Natasha concedes. He’s an untrained civilian - unprotected without his armour. It’s a fifty-fifty shot between who’s the easier target, him or Bruce, and they choose him.

The guards have him crowded face-first against the front glass of Natasha’s cell and she doesn’t react anymore. This is hardly the first time after all. From this close she can see he’s drugged: pupils blown wide and dark, sclera crawling in red. He’s naked and when he struggles against their hold he only succeeds at smearing his own blood all over the glass. The first blow knocks his head into the unbreakable pane and someone behind him kicks his legs further apart for easier access.

Natasha doesn’t turn away. She sits facing him with her back to the wall. She can hear Steve and Thor and Bruce yelling from their respective cells but she doesn’t add her voice to the chorus. She can’t.

 _Look at what you did to them, Tony,_ a Vietnamese man with round glasses says gently as Stark’s forced to survey what’s left of her; what’s left of them all. _Do not pretend the futurist could not predict this ending. You are a man of many faults but you know who you are._

Thor roars something in the background but Stark doesn’t hear him, tuned solely to the soft foreign cadence as if it were gospel. _You only wished you were more._ Then, _**I** only wished you were more._

Stark takes the next hit without a sound. His unseeing eyes meet hers through the glass and when he opens his mouth instead of something clever a dark mix of blood and bile drips out followed by a wet, burbling laugh. It is more awful than any scream they’ve wrung from Stark’s throat and this is not the end but it is the moment when Natasha knows they’re going to lose him.

Stark laughs and bleeds and _breaks_. The others howl.

Natasha couldn’t join in even if she wanted to. Her lips have been sewn shut.

—————————

She wakes in her cell that first day with a bald head and sewn lips.

Bruce is pacing in the cell facing hers, Thor in the one next to him. She can hear Steve and Stark though their cells are outside her line of sight. Clint is nowhere to be found. She uses her nails to rip out the stitches to call for him, blood running down her chin.

He doesn’t answer and she learns a valuable lesson: when she next wakes her lips are restitched and she’s missing her hand.

—————————

At the beginning Stark fights. He spews insults and snorts and smirks. They drag him out of his cell into the corridor between the rows where the rest of them can see. They push him up against transparent barriers for close-ups. It’s not to make an example of him; it’s humiliation, plain and simple, and for a man as proud as Stark she doesn’t doubt he hates that the most. They beat him, insult him, violate him in full view. They bare his vulnerabilities to people too kind to understand that Stark could forgive them for bearing witness but never for showing they care.

The guards who do it wear facial alteration masks: a parade of imperfect replicas from Tony’s checkered past. They keep Stark just drugged enough to miss the differences in heights or accents or age, never enough for the reprieve of oblivion.

 _Don’t listen to him! That’s not Howard!_ Steve yells and he doesn’t notice that Stark flinches at his raised voice too. Thor swings his fist at the glass of his cell and the resounding crack causes Stark to stagger away in panic. Bruce tries soothing babble but Stark drags himself to the front of Natasha’s cell because she alone has kept herself small and quiet, curled away from the glass.

The men dressed like his father and godfather follow languidly: Howard with blood trickling down his forehead, Stane with a cigar and burn scars. Dead men, the pair of them. They loom over their prey and chuckle before one large white hand reaches for the mess of scar tissue in the centre of Stark’s naked chest and _presses_. Tony gasps around a scream as the men’s voices swap and blend; Howard to Stane and Stane to Howard -

_Anthony, Anthony, my darling boy. We’re so **proud** of you._

———————

There’s a man in the shadows wearing her old boss’s face. He’s not here for Stark or Steve regardless of what they may think: he’s here for _her_. He’s always here for her. So she refuses to acknowledge him, ignores the white teeth glowing in the darkened corner. She watches the bloody spectacle in front of her instead, day-in, day-out, until one day she’s finally worn thin and her discipline snaps and she _looks_ -

The man just stares back with his single, unblinking eye until Natasha’s eyes water. He smiles a smile Natasha’s never seen - full of warmth and humour and madness as his hand pulls back his black eyepatch to reveal what lies beneath: no scar, no cataract, no eyelid. Nothing but a black, bottomless hole. A cold abyss she could fall into forever; apathetic and beautiful.

They are of a kind, this shadow and her. Her team will never understand. She remembers what it was to be an empty void wearing a human suit. When the suffering of the self and others meant nothing. She remembers what it was to be perfect.

She wishes for it still.

Steve’s voice drags her back to reality like hooks sunk into flesh. So do the heavy sounds of Thor’s bootsteps and Bruce’s placating babble, Stark’s laboured breathing - even the silence of Clint’s absence is deafening. She folds, cracks. She looks away from the abyss and when she blinks her eyes sting and saltwater falls. A single tear makes no sound as it falls.

 _He_ must have noticed. They take her eye next.

—————————

They let Steve keep his principles and teach him exactly how little they’re worth.

They’ve taken the serum away, leaving him small and weak. _Baby Ruth,_ Stark had called him early enough in their captivity that Stark could still string two thoughts together, _from the era before steroids_. Even without a sightline Natasha could picture Steve glaring back and it was too close to normal.

It seems so arrogant in retrospect. A joke made however many weeks ago when they were still invincible.

Steve’s not locked in his cell. He can push his way out whenever he likes and has free reign over the cavern. They’ve left him his uniform; pants too long, suit too heavy, boots too large, but no serum and no shield. He is no longer Captain America but he is still _Steve Rogers, a good man_ and that, Natasha knows Steve would have said a lifetime ago, was the part worth keeping.

And then they let him learn.

All the freedom in the world can’t decrypt locks or smash unbreakable glass. All that combat training is useless without the leverage and strength to back it up. All his determination to protect the rest of them means less than nothing when the guards remove him with ease. They never leave bruises and Natasha knows Steve hates that more than anything: that they are so careful with him and so cruel with the rest of them.

Stark gets fed up with the futility first. _Lets dispense with the undercard today, Rogers,_ he spits as he glares at the guards who have come for him. _Just skip to the main event._

Steve suppresses a flinch. Stark can’t know how much Steve needs this, needs to pretend even if it never slows them down, but it’s just another way Steve is reminded that nothing he does matters. He can’t escape or comfort his friends or overpower the enemy. He is reduced to words and intentions and he is learning what Natasha has always known and what Stark would claim to; that they are not enough. Not by a long shot.

A good man is hard to find, true, but what is a good man worth? The simple, elegant answer is _nothing_.

It is the cruellest thing they could do to Steve: to strip him to his core and show him what his notion of _good_ has bought him. So they make him watch as Stark loses his mind, as Natasha loses her limbs, as Bruce loses his temper and Thor loses himself.

They’ve already lost Clint.

——————

On the other side of Natasha’s wall, in the empty space between her cell and Stark’s lies an alcove.

In the alcove lies the tomb of _Clint Francis Barton_.

——————

She’s not surprised. A part of her had already known and another has always been ready for this.

 _I’m sorry,_ Steve says. Words were never his forte but here they’re all he has. _I’m sorry, Nat, I’m so sorry._ He begs her for the forgiveness her shuttered mouth won’t let her give, kneels in front of the glass of her cell below the bloody smear where Stark was last and repeats it like an altar boy with his rosary. _I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry…_

Natasha feels nothing but pins and needles at the end of her dead wrist, the ache of a phantom limb.

——————

It should have been easy for Thor to save them.

Their captors have the Asgardian contained in the same type of cell as the rest of them and unlike Stark they have not stripped him of his battle armour, unlike Steve they have left him his weapon. So when Thor wakes that first day in all his resplendent finery to Mjolnir resting on a raised platform in the centre of his cell Natasha figures they have minutes to prepare for their escape.

It’s been days, weeks. (Time has run away from them.)

Mjolnir still sits proudly on its column. Not untouched but unmoved.

———————

The cells aren’t generic. They’re specialized in a way that gives her pause.

Steve’s has an army cot he drags awkwardly out of his cell and into the corridor so he never wakes alone. Thor’s has a daybed and a platform and a rich tapestry hung across all three walls. It’s breathtaking in its detail and Natasha catches him fingering the embroidered thread like braille as he follows the saga of his life: half outsized lie and half raw truth.

Stark’s cell is white and bare except for tub filled with water now dyed pink from his blood from when he uses it to wash himself and when they use it to drown him. The walls of Natasha’s cell are mirrored so she can see her deformities reflected ad infinitum, so she can’t run from the nightmare she is becoming.

Bruce on the other hand, gets a picture-perfect IKEA living set.

He wrecks it the third day he calls and his monster doesn’t answer.

————————

Time has slipped away so Natasha marks the passing days in other ways. Morning wake-up call is when they drag Stark out to play and everyone wakes to thumps and curses and whimpers. They abandon him, bloody and silent on the floor and give Steve at least an hour to realize he can’t help. Stark flinches back from Steve’s touch like it burns, ignores whatever pleas fall from his lips. Confuses help with hurt, past with present, as he spirals further and further away from reality and them.

Whenever they decide to deposit Stark back in his cell is christened Noon. This is when Bruce speaks to Steve and the rest of them pretend they don’t hear. _It’s not your fault, Cap, none of this is._ Everyday, reassuring and quiet, and Steve will say nothing. The white star of his uniform is stained a permanent rust colour from where he’s mopped blood from glass. By the time Steve turns to Natasha, Bruce’s words have put enough of him back together that he always, always tries to smile.

It’s easy to smile back. She was always the more gifted liar.

He’ll sit and talk to her until mid-afternoon rolls around and frustration boils over. Steve leaves them to search for useful supplies in the cavern. Bruce is left to his own devices and without someone else to concentrate on his focus turns inward. Thor paces and glares at Mjolnir, launches himself at the glass until cracks appear but the pane never breaks.

Dusk is whenever Stark finally falls asleep, exhausted, and Steve wanders back. That’s when he, Bruce and Thor take turns telling her stories, telling her secrets, each trying to outdo the other like boys at summer camp but keeping their voices low. Midnight is when Thor says _goodnight_ to each of them like it’s something he’s capable of giving.

Three a.m. is when everyone else is asleep and Natasha lays awake thinking about the people they all used to be.

———————-

Bruce sleeps even less than her. The Hulk may be missing but forced to deal with their captivity, forced to stare at her as they take from her, piece by piece, Bruce’s calm is missing too. His temper catches up with him. In the dead of night he rips apart the bed, the sheets, breaks the desk, shatters the lamp - and when he’s done his eyes are as brown as when he started.

They always replace the furniture the next day. The IKEA set becomes antique wooden furniture, becomes a motel room, becomes a dorm, becomes a child’s bunkbed complete with framed photographs of a proud mother and father with a small boy. Bruce picks up the family portrait and throws it so hard against the wall it shatters - an action not nearly as damning as when he searches out the photograph afterwards and holds it in a white-knuckled grip, anger warring with an utter inability to let go.

As far as she knows she’s the only one who figures it out. For some people reliving the past - the good and the bad - is death by nostalgia and grief in turns. It is drowning Bruce silently, in full view. He deals until he can’t and his temper explodes. Then they calmly reset him at another checkpoint in his life, surrounding him with another reminder of all that he’s lost and all that he can’t leave behind.

Late one night she wakes to Bruce sitting on a child’s space-themed blanket, breathing slowly and heavily as he stares at the ceiling. It isn’t an alarming sight until Natasha remembers the bedspread is not and has never been that shade of blood red.

——————————

 _I’m sorry if I scared you,_ he whispers later, ashamed. _I thought everyone was asleep._

She has several broken bones in her hand from pounding on the glass of her cell. Bruce’s self-inflicted wounds are better hidden. There are self-applied white bandages around his forearms and her imagination plays tricks on her, makes her see dark crimson leaking through. He tugs his shirtsleeves down and Natasha glares.

 _I had to be sure,_ he pleads. _The Other Guy always came for me when I tried before. It was an experiment, I’m not going to do it again. Please look at me, Nat._

She can’t. If she does she’ll get angry and her rage doesn’t grant her superstrength either. _For Science_ is not an acceptable excuse but she thinks that maybe in this case the lie serves a greater purpose than the truth. She needs to believe that Bruce has his answer so he won’t do it again. He won’t attempt to leave her again. Not like Clint did. Not like Thor and Stark are. Not like Steve will, soon.

They don’t replace his furniture this time. The bloodstain lingers.

————————

She wakes without her left breast. Without her right foot. She tries not to think of how many more pounds of flesh she owes, how much more deserved retribution her body can take. That way lies madness.

She wakes, that matters.

————————

It’s Thor who sleeps.

Natasha can’t see him anymore. A dense spiderweb of fissures runs through every region of the glass of his cell until it utterly obscures the man behind it. But the pane still holds. Resilient. Unbreakable. She can only see a distorted image through it.

Eventually Thor stops hitting the glass, stops telling tales, stops speaking. He divests himself of his armour, dropping chain and plate to the floor next to Mjolnir like every piece is an unbearable weight. He starts reading the tapestry of his life as if it all happened to someone else: the tale of a God among men, in a galaxy far, far away who lived uproarious adventures, now retold to a trapped man in a box who has forgotten he was once glorious.

One day Steve peers through a sliver of still-transparent glass and sees Thor asleep, the tapestry pulled down from the walls as a blanket, his chest rising and falling in rhythm. He never wakes.

Prince Charming at rest. Waiting.

———————

The days get longer; they don’t drag Stark out as often. Tony doesn’t talk to them anymore. He sings. Nonsense syllables but always in tune. It’s nothing anyone would suspect; melodic and light and sad.

 _I didn’t know he could sing,_ Steve says quietly to her, like he’s afraid to raise his voice.

Bruce knows, Natasha can see it in his face, but he swallows it down and tucks the secret away as if Stark has any use for them now, laid bare as he is.

 _Stark?_ Steve says, concerned, as he approaches Stark’s cell like you would a caged tiger. _Tony?_

Stark doesn’t answer; won’t answer to them ever again. This has been a long time coming and even if Natasha was the one to spot it first Bruce buries his head in his hands because he knew it was coming too. Steve, though. Steve didn’t. He _couldn’t_ and it’s not in him to believe it now.

So he tries. He holds one-sided versions of conversations they could have had - _should_ have had. He pours himself out to Stark in a flood - fears, regrets, insecurities. Every little weakness, every little confession Steve was so sure Tony would have weaponized and sent back his way rushes out - too late for it to do any good or any harm. _Too late, too late, too late._

 _It’s not your fault, Cap. None of this is,_ Bruce tries but it doesn’t work like it used to. Not when there are so few of them left.

———————

She wakes, once, on the operating table. There’s no pain only startling numbness and then the blurry outline of Bruce as he notices she’s aware.

 _Hold on, Nat. Hold on,_ he repeats as his gloved hands dip into her abdomen to stem the steady leak of liquid. _Please, please, please,_ he breathes, the desperate prayer of an atheist to No One.

This is the pattern. They take what they want from her and they make Bruce stitch her up. This is how she pictures him now: black-shadowed head set against harsh halogen lights, not a shade of green in sight as he races to reassure her and himself that although he is _not that kind of doctor_ he is good enough for this. He can save her, over and over again, only to perpetuate the cycle until the day comes when there will be nothing left of her to save.

He reluctantly parts with the details afterward. He knows she needs the information. (He has talked more to her in the last few weeks than he has since he came back.) He tells her where her wrist has been severed, between what joints her ankle ends. She only has one kidney left, only has one lung.

After he’s talked until his voice is hoarse, he always whispers, _I’m sorry._

He apologizes every time and she can’t figure out why. It’s nothing she hasn’t endured before.

———————

They never break Steve. They don’t have to.

The cavern is cold and damp, his cot is hard. Steve weakens, slows, stumbles. Natasha notices and even if she could she would not point it out. There’s nothing they can do.

One day Steve starts coughing and doesn’t stop.

—————————

 _I love you. You know that, right?_ Bruce says. They’re not the only ones awake but they’re the only ones listening. The others are deaf to them in one way or another.

She nods because she does know. Bruce is brave in quieter ways than the Hulk. He knows what love is, knows what it can do to people, and has decided to love quietly, recklessly anyway.

 _I loved Clint too,_ he exhales and Natasha wants to resent him for how easily the confession falls from his lips when she fought herself for years. _And I love you, Steve,_ he whispers down the hallway to where they both can see Rogers resting fitfully in his deteriorated state.

Bruce says the next to the ceiling, _Thor, with all your crazy alien-ness. I love you too if you can hear me._ He closes his eyes and leans against the glass, _And Tony. Tony. God, I loved_ \- he corrects himself - _**love** Tony, even if I’m starting to hate that song he always sings._

Natasha can’t help the genuine smile creeping across her face and Bruce shares in it. It’s fond and honest at once and she can no longer ignore that she loves this man too, after a fashion.

 _I love you all and I need you to know,_ he whispers like it’s a secret, like any of them ever doubted. _I’m not going to regret saying nothing this time._

Natasha wonders who it was that Bruce never got to tell.

—————————

 _Tony,_ Steve whispers softly between coughing fits, for a madman’s ears only. _Tony, I miss you. Come back. Please._

The singing stops for an instant before starting up again; the record skipping.

——————

She wonders which will come for her first: death or madness. If she’s destined for Steve’s fate or Stark’s. She wonders how long Bruce will last with no one and what will happen if Thor ever wakes. (She wonders if Clint would envy them their lives.)

Every day she wonders and every day she wakes to an infinite array of her own reflections: each a different facet of maimed and ugly and broken.

 _She_ remains intact.

That has to matter, otherwise nothing does.

—————————

They break Stark first and that’s their mistake. A genius reduced to broken splinters remains a genius; simply one untethered by conscience or haste.

Natasha can hear Stark’s favourite melody floating over the soft sleeping exhales of the others and then suddenly there he is, in front of her cell. She can only stare in astonishment. They haven’t let Stark out in a long time and never unaccompanied.

He’s still naked except for a pair of sunglasses he’s acquired somehow and from behind them he studies her back like she’s an exhibit at a zoo. The whistling never stops. Natasha bangs on the glass and across the row, Bruce twitches. Stark’s head swivels around to look at him, gaze unreadable. The whistling gives way to babbling nonsense sung with the soothing care of a lullaby and Bruce’s restless sleep settles.

Stark turns towards the exit, walks right on by. Ignoring her, ignoring Bruce. Dismissed. Natasha tears at the stitches in her lips with the only hand she has left. In the corridor, Stark steps over Steve’s sleeping, quaking form without a second glance.

 _Tony,_ she rasps, through a mouthful of blood, hand pressed up to the glass. Her unused voice can’t manage more than a whisper. _Tony, please._

Neither the name nor the plea stops him and Natasha knows she doesn’t have anything else to trade. This is Stark finally free in every way that matters; empty and happy and under obligation to no one. Whatever instinctual memory he has left of her has told him to leave her trapped, to save himself and that’s - that’s -

There’s an awful laugh echoing through the cell and it takes her a moment to realize it’s coming from her. It chokes out of her, sprays the inside of her cell with aspirated blood, and she can’t stop. It hurts like skin rubbed raw after shackles, like all catharsis should.

Slowly Stark comes back like a man drawn to a siren. Natasha carries on and when she stops, chokes on the last syllable, she’s reminded of the reverse - when it was him bloody and laughing and smeared against the glass, when it was her holding herself apart.

She wonders if he remembers. She wonders if he forgives her.

————————

Stark just walks away again and this time Natasha lets him go.

He reappears shortly afterwards, smiling. In his outstretched palm is a single human eye.

————————

The cells don’t require a retinal scan. Stark opens hers with a code and her first instinct is to rush for the freedom of the hallway. Instead she takes the sticky orb from his outstretched hand like it’s precious because it is. The eye is a gift: a replacement for the one she lost, and even if it doesn’t begin to scratch the surface of what’s broken of her, the echo of Tony Stark wants to try to fix her anyway.

He smiles brightly with pride when she takes it from him and tucks it carefully into her back pocket. She can’t move quickly through the hallway, her asymmetry slows her and Stark is beyond offering help. In the sweet, circulated air of the corridor she limps on one foot towards the soft noises emanating from Stark’s cell. The guard inside is still alive, but barely. He’s bleeding something sluggish and black down his left side, the rest has flooded the floor around him like a fan. He’s missing his right eye and the vicious child in Natasha wishes she had the time to take everything from him.

She makes a start, catalogues the guard’s existence until everything is neatly arrayed on the floor on the other side of the room: a gun, a taser, a uniform, two boots, a cap, a key. The only item Stark deemed worthy of actual theft were the guard’s dark sunglasses and Natasha finds a small smile for the confirmation that parts of _Tony Stark_ were anchored too deeply to ever get truly upended.

On the white wall in Stark’s handwriting are a series of 6 digit numbers scrawled in the black tacky substance that is not ink. She doesn’t care how Stark knows the cell codes. She memorizes them, collects the gun, a key around a chain, tosses the uniform at Stark to put on.

The guard’s remaining eye is blank and docile, cold but confused. He makes no attempt to call for help, no attempt to scream. She doesn’t ask him why. She doesn’t want to hear his answer. He doesn’t offer one, or beg for his life. He’s as voiceless as she is -

 _No,_ she says out loud to prove she can. She levels the gun. _No._

The gunshot wakes everyone up.

————————

 _Natasha?_ Bruce asks, alarmed. _What’s happened -_

She unlocks the door to his cell and just points to Steve who has come-to erupting in a coughing fit. Bruce doesn’t think twice and races over, leaving her to more difficult tasks. Bruce and Steve were the easy ones, Thor is still caught in an unnatural sleep.

Inside his cell Stark is inspecting him closely, trying to poke him awake. It doesn’t work and Natasha doesn’t bother trying it herself. So she does what she never wanted to do and reaches for Mjolnir. She applies no pressure, just wraps her one good hand around the grip and for a single instant she wishes she were the Natasha from years ago: strong and whole and too aloof to play who-can-pick-up-the-hammer with the boys. It’s seductive to believe she might have had a chance then but now, now she can feel the leather under her palm and all she can focus on are the broken bones of her hand grinding together. To her Mjolnir is nothing; a weapon she is ill-equipped to use, a would-be burden on weak muscles and cracked joints.

To Thor it is more.

She doesn’t get a chance to pull. There’s a roar as Thor awakes and grabs Stark before launching them both into the corridor to the shocked shouts of Bruce and Steve. There’s yelling and shouting but it’s Thor who manages something coherent first.

 _Anthony,_ he chokes in recognition, lowering Tony to the ground and dropping to his knees without grace. _My dear friend. Anthony._ Thor buries his face in Stark’s abdomen and clutches him closer.

Thor may have recognized Stark but the reverse is not true. Tony struggles frantically under his grip, lashing out, eyes wide and panicked. No one has touched Stark kindly in ages. Contact meant beatings and humiliation, and sense-memory is a hard thing to shake. Natasha knew better than to try.

 _Anthony?_ Thor asks, confused, because he was asleep by the end when Stark stopped being Stark and became this. The Prince lets go and Stark darts away, dark eyes wild and suspicious of them all. Thor raises his hands slowly in surrender. _I’m sorry._

Thor looks to the rest of them and no one says a word. No one wants to admit they’ve lost Stark; no one wants to add to Thor’s guilt.

 _I’m sorry,_ Thor whispers again to everyone and no one.

 _We are too,_ Steve answers for them all. The constant gravelly rattle echoing through his infected ribcage serves as an unwelcome reminder.

If nothing changes soon, they’ll lose Steve next.

————————

Thor doesn’t hesitate at her mutilated appearance, just wraps his strength around her in a careful hug. She wants to resent the fact that he’s being so restrained but they are all too fragile. He holds her like she’s glass and it is the best feeling in the world. Her eye flutters shut around the water pooled there.

 _Natasha,_ he whispers reverently into her shorn scalp like she is still beautiful. _Brave Natasha._

She is no longer beautiful but she has always been brave so she speaks the truth aloud. _Worthy, worthy Thor._

————————

It’s the first time she’s seen the tomb. She was expecting something heavy and formal but it’s not like that. There’s a naked chubby cherub with a bow and arrow carved out of granite on it and a bullseye etched onto the front. It’s cheesy as all hell and Clint would have loved it.

There is also, for no obvious reason, a keypad.

The terrible feeling rising in Natasha’s stomach feels disastrously like _hope_.

————————

There are only four codes painted on Stark’s wall but it takes Bruce all of ten seconds to figure out the pattern and deduce the fifth. The numbers flash on the keypad, the casket opens and inside there is a body.

It looks dead. Its eyes are taped shut and it’s floating in what looks like a sensory deprivation tank. Electrodes are connected to its limbs and head. There is something to be said for the delicate removal of medical devices but Thor has never heard it. He just grabs the body around the waist and rips it away from its sarcophagus, hauls it up and out to plant it on the stone floor.

Once righted the body shudders unnaturally.

Clint gasps, chokes, screams, falls, in that order.

————————

They take a moment. They _need_ a moment but they’re trying to be so careful with one another.

Thor uses the slightest fraction of his power to help Steve sit on his own, careful to let him feign strength when he has none. And if Steve holds onto Thor a little longer than he truly needs there’s no shame in that. Natasha squeezes Bruce’s forearm with her good hand and feels the bulk of the bandages concealed there. He offers her a small smile back. Thor has to gently hold Clint back from trying to touch Stark and when Clint looks at her she just shakes her head. She leans against Steve’s bony shoulder, lets him support her without words.

Clint just stares at them all, drinks them in like a man dying of thirst in the desert. _You’re all alive._

 _So are you,_ Natasha says, words still foreign on her tongue. Beneath her hand Clint’s wrist is pale and dead. Pulseless.

 _I hope so,_ Clint replies softly, then too quietly for anyone but her to hear, _but if I’m not that’s okay. As long as you all are._

He goes back to staring at them - broken, sick and insane as they are - like they’re the avenging angels of his dreams; like they’re marvels.

————————

Thor leaves Mjolnir behind on its plinth, his armour scattered around it like an offering. He doesn’t even look back. Steve is tiny cradled in the god’s arms, uniform swimming around him, head tucked towards warmth. Stark walks around an empty shell in a dead man’s clothes and when Bruce thinks no one’s looking he slips the photograph from his cell into his shirt, next to his heart. Clint has an arm wrapped behind Natasha’s waist and her truncated arm slung over his shoulders. She has the guard’s gun in her one hand, his eye in her back pocket and his key around her neck.

The key slides smoothly into the lock of the cavern door. From behind her she can hear the familiar opening bars of Stark’s humming through the air and then Clint starts singing, softly at first, under his breath so Natasha’s the only one who can hear. Then louder. Then Stark joins in.

_…Try to remember the kind of September, when you were a tender and callow fellow…_

They’re the first words anyone has heard Stark utter in a long, long time. No one moves, no one breathes until the song is over.

 _You know the lyrics,_ Bruce chokes out in awe like Clint’s found the Rosetta Stone.

Clint stutters and looks confused. _Yeah. I mean, sure. Better question, when did Tony start singing show tunes?_

Bruce just grins, so does Thor, even Steve erupts in laughter that soon descends into a coughing fit but one that suggests it might well be worth it. Clint just raises an eyebrow and Natasha doesn’t explain. She just turns towards the exit, gun at the ready. Clint pushes opens the door and -

————————

They wake on the floor of the Malaysian ruin, intact. Physically, at least.

There is one major difference though: Clint is no longer dead.

————————

He lies to Maria: _I don’t care what the rest of them told you, I’m not dead! I was never dead!_ and then he smashes the radio. Clint’s not a supersoldier, his hand breaks. Bruce wraps it carefully in a splint but Clint refuses the painkillers. Pain, Natasha knows, is firmly in the province of the living.

Across the Quinjet Thor keeps shifting Mjolnir from one hand to the other, never quite daring to let go. The others fall fitfully in and out of dreams but Thor stays awake and alert, haunted by a dreamless sleep. Bruce is still playing doctor even though it was never his job. He can no longer hold himself apart with so much experience holding them all together. Steve makes an unsubtle point of touching everyone; a hand on Thor’s shoulder, a swayed bump into Bruce, reaching across Clint. When it’s her turn she doesn’t let him get away with it; wraps both arms around his neck and tugs him close until she feels him relax. It is the least she could do for a man who kept trying.

Everyone steers clear of Stark. It’s Bruce who works up the courage first, slides himself into the co-pilot’s seat; not talking, not touching. Stark’s utterly unreachable behind the plates of his armour with the faceplate shuttered and locked. ACDC blasts through the cockpit speakers at full volume and no one tells him to turn it down.

Natasha doesn’t worry. He’ll pull enough of Tony Stark together by the time they land to fool the people they’ll need to fool. They’ll all pull enough together. It won’t even be pretending because none of it was real. They never died, slept, went mad, got sick, were torn limb from limb. Those things never happened.

Steve slumps across from her, majestic body folding inward as if it remembers illness. _Please talk to me._

 _About what?_ she asks coolly as she runs her hands over each other, Clint plastered to her side, warmth to warmth, skin to skin.

Steve tips his head back against the bulkhead and closes his eyes. He leans into Thor. _It doesn’t matter, I just need to hear your voice._

Natasha tells him a story about hell.

————————

They last admirably through their first debriefing only for Stark to shoot someone midway through the second.

 _It was my fault,_ Strange says, staring at his hands and Natasha can see the echoes of the proud surgeon he once was. _I summoned them to rescue you from the Void. I ordered them to return you all unharmed._

Thor’s grip on Mjolnir turns white-knuckled and neither Steve nor Clint raise their gaze from the table. Bruce closes his eyes and breathes through his nose, tightening the lid on the anger he’s out of practice restraining. Natasha sits, untouched and untouchable, her hair brushing lightly against her neck.

 _Mission fucking **failed,**_ Stark says, acidic tongue poisoning every word. Over-compensation for months of vulnerability out of his control.

 _Tony,_ Steve warns automatically and Stark looks surprised at the use his first name. No one else is, Steve’s been using it for months.

 _It was unharmed they misunderstood._ Strange’s face falls into his hands, long, broken fingers hiding his eyes. _By their covenant they couldn’t return you until you were healed. They were powerful enough to retrieve you from the Void but they have no concept of human. Or Asgardian._

Strange looks at them, somber and guilty; a doctor with patients whose care he’s screwed up. _They tried to cure you and didn’t know how._

——————————

Imagine a child trying to put a puzzle together but without access to the picture on the box. Who can’t tell which pieces are damaged and need repair, and which are damaged and part of the scenery. Imagine a surgeon who doesn’t know where the infection ends and you begin and so keeps cutting.

They see Stark’s brilliant, diseased mind; his guilt, his responsibilities, his anger/self-hatred/fear/self-destruction and they relieve him of it all by tipping him up and over the edge. They take the artificial serum from Steve, leave the sick husk behind, and they don’t know it’s not an improvement. They break the violent magical bond the weapon holds over the Prince of Asgard and save a kingdom. They take the monster from Bruce and when that does nothing to dull his rage, they soothe him with items from his past they don’t understand are taunts. They find Clint dead and at peace, and so once resurrected they keep him buried and mum - as close to _dead_ as possible - in the hope he finds peace.

She’s the enigma, the holdout. They can’t isolate what’s wrong with her. They start with her hair, her voice. Then her hand, her eye, her foot, her kidney. They pare her down a little at a time, hoping by random chance to cut out the tumour; the whatever-it-is at her core that makes her broken. They don’t know they’re looking in all the wrong places. It turns out she can be missing limbs and organs but all she needs to feel whole is _________. After that it’s a clean bill of health all ‘round.

They don’t escape at all. They’re released.

—————————

Back in reality the portrait is primed, the players are ready. Stark snarls and raises a hidden repulsor and that’s everyone’s cue.

The concussive force knocks Strange out of his chair and Thor lets go of his hammer for the first time since they woke to catch him. Mjolnir falls to the ground like a lead weight, cracking the flagstone. Bruce’s anger disappears instantly at the sight of blood, still too used at playing doctor to let the monster out as he rushes forward to Strange’s side.

Steve has already leapt over the table, all strength and fluid grace, to pin Stark and his gauntlet to the wall. Stark panics, thrashes under the bulk, eyes wild, mind elsewhere and Natasha can hear Steve’s low voice sobbing _I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry_ because she knows this isn’t how Steve wanted to touch Tony next; how any of them wanted anyone to touch Stark ever again. (Steve can’t save the people he loves from anything, not with all the serum in the world.)

Natasha doesn’t react. She stays stock still and across from her Clint slowly reaches out to grip both her hands in his, squeezing.

 _I’m sorry,_ Strange says, host to a bloodied lip and not a concussion.

 _We are too,_ Bruce echoes, because Strange saved them from the Void and they can’t be grateful for it.

Stark eventually stops trying to break Steve’s hold, his body gone lax and unresisting - Steve’s the one shaking now; his need to let go warring with his need to keep close. Thor’s standing over his hammer, debating the merits of taking it up once more. Bruce has retreated to the nearest chair to examine the fascinating expanse of unmarked skin on his forearms.

 _I’m sorry,_ Strange repeats, drawing his cape closer like a child with a blanket. _I know it’s not enough._

Natasha finds Clint’s pulse, steady and strong, under her fingers and thinks _of course it is._

Stark laughs; a bitter, dark sound - richer now for the sanity behind it. Everyone flinches as it echoes through the room. In the polished dark wood of the table Natasha’s reflection is perfect once more.

They live, that matters.

**Author's Note:**

>  _Warning:_ This fic contains oblique references to and/or graphic/non-graphic representations of: amputation, rape, attempted suicide, torture (physical and psychological), major character death, medical procedures and psychotic breaks. Most of these are inflicted upon the Avengers, with the exception of some death and maiming inflicted by the Avengers upon the bad guys. 
> 
> _Ending spoilers:_ All of this takes place in a pocket reality the Avengers eventually escape. The physical aspects of their ordeal do not endure. The forces responsible are not punished for blue-and-orange morality reasons. Natasha is more sympathetic to this outcome than the others.
> 
> Imagine an Avengers/Saw mash-up in Oz where Jigsaw is both better at his job and has no idea what he’s doing is wrong. God, it sounds terrible when I put it like that.


End file.
